Harris Interactive has been running an online survey each year involving more than 2000 respondents, and they've managed to collect some interesting backup statistics. But, before we cover the numbers, we just want to say that at SourcePath Consulting, we really value our clients. We want to be able to provide a service that enables our clients to focus on performing better at their business. We want to see our Southeast Michigan clients grow, succeed and thrive in an economy that, let's face it, isn't making things easy. Our goal isn't to make you spend all of your budget on souping up your IT to the point where it is uneconomical to maintain; instead we try to provide the very best in IT best practices and proactive management.

With that said, keeping you in business is extremely important to us. So, let's take a look at why data backup can be such an up-hill battle.

Harris Interactive's yearly survey (which was held on behalf of Backblaze, a consumer-driven online backup service) was geared towards adults who own a PC. These aren't necessarily businesses, but the results are staggering nonetheless. The results show that 93% of computer users risk data loss, because only 7% of users are backing up their data daily. 14% of users back up their data weekly or more, and 27% back their data up monthly.

Granted, data-loss may not be as high of a concern for home users if they don't have a business on the line. Still, there are plenty of solutions to automate backup for home PCs. Now, let's look at the numbers that really frighten us...

In a study by The Diffusion Group, over a thousand small businesses were asked about their backup habits. 40% of small and medium sized businesses don't backup their data. 60% of all data for small businesses is stored on devices that aren't backed up, like desktops or notebooks. Worst of all, of companies that DO backup their data, between 40% and 50% of all backups are not fully recoverable due to faulty media or general failures mostly involving improper setup, tape media failure, and lack of regular testing.

Backup is vital for a small business, but data-loss occurs all the time, it's inevitable that you'll eventually need to recover from some type of disaster.

Here are some more stats: According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of businesses filed for bankruptcy within one year of a data-loss disaster. 50% of those filed immediately. According to the Richmond House Group, 20% of small-to-medium sized businesses will suffer a major disaster causing loss of data every 5 years. According to Carbonite, an on-line backup service, 70% of business people have experienced data loss due to simple acts, such as accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, etc. And lastly, according to the Gartner Group, 71% of all tape restores fail.

Contact us today if your company isn't properly backing up data, or even if you have even the slightest suspicion that your data backup solution isn't doing it's job. You'll want to test them regularly. Call us at 248-737-7920 and we'll gladly point you in the right direction to make sure you can prevent the terrible damages data loss can cause.